The left and rape : why we should all be ashamed of the left’s role in covering up the rape of 2 million women.

A blogpost from an ex-Socialist Workers Party (UK) member about the neglect of the topic of rapes that occured during World War II. TRIGGER WARNING: This content deals with accounts of sexual assault and may be distressing for some people

How I was a rape denier & accepted rape myths

Denial: Twenty odd years ago I picked up a battered old paperback in one of my city’s many wonderful second a woman in berlinhand bookshops.It was called “A Woman In Berlin”. Not only was it a personal testimony, in fact a diary, from the Second World War – a pet favourite subject. It was by a woman. And it was set in the Berlin of Germany’s Year Zero (1945).

However, I stopped reading it when it became clear that the main bit of history it dealt with was the rape of two million German women by the Red Army, the Liberators of Europe. I stopped not because I couldn’t cope with reading personal accounts of being gang raped (though that would certainly put me off it now).

I stopped reading it because I didn’t want to believe it.

Perhaps the book was a forgery I told myself – after all, it had been published in the US in the 1950s at the hight of McCarthyism, but not since. Surely it was just CIA propaganda? Surely not all men were potential rapists? Surely the Russians were no worse than anyone else?

Cover Up : Years later I was able to give a talk to my SWP branch on the Second World War. I had a lot to say, and went on for over half an hour, though nobody seemed to mind. I had a lot to say about such a complex subject. But I said nothing about the mass rapes committed by the Red Army – or for that matter by the Germans in Russia, which were worse, or the Japanese in China and Korea.
12 Million Rapes : “Just a detail in the history of World War II”?

When French wannabe-Fuhrer Jean Marie Le Pen called the murder of 6 million Jewish people a “detail in the history of World War Two”, he was quite rightly condemned, and had to pay a 1.2million franc fine.

Yet the attitude to nearly all historians of world war two towards the mass rapes of up to twelve million women is that it either just a detail, a footnote, or not even worthy of mention. Obviously it’s not just The Left that have a problem with recognising the reality of rape as part of war. Practically none of the many volumes of military history give it as much as a mention.

Martin Gilbert‘s “The Second World War: A Complete History” completely ignores the experience of the millions of women who were raped.

Winston Churchill’s condensed version of his “The Second World War” has plenty to say about the finals days of the war in Europe, describing well how military strategy had become dominated by the future rivalry between the USSR and the West. But, apart from alluding to “terrible things” done by the Russians in the East, he says nothing about the mass rapes.

John Erickson‘s authoritative and masterful “The Road to Berlin” manages just a few lines in 877 pages, describing “an uncontrollable mob intent on pillage and rape” (pg 584) and “Soviet soldiers raped at will” (pg 466)

Russian Rape Apologists – From Stalin to Putin

In the decades that followed the war, politicians acted as rape apologists for the crimes of their soldiers. Stalin was warned in 1945 by German Communists that the rapes were turning the population against them. Stalin fumed: “I will not allow anyone to drag the reputation of the Red Army in the mud.” This has been the attitude of Soviet and Russian ploticians ever since. For example, Cornelius Ryan referred to the mass rapes by the Red Army during the battle for Berlin in “The Last Battle” in 1966, leading to him being attacked for smears in the Soviet Communist Party daily “Pravda”.

In 2003, Antony Beevor’s popular “Berlin: The Downfall,1945” along with Virago Press’s publication in 2005 of “A Woman In Berlin” and a 2008 film of the book finally brought the horror faced by German women in 1945 into popular consciousness. The response of the post-Soviet Russian ambassador to London was to condemn the rape allegations as an “act of blasphemy.” ! As with current the current refusal of many Japanese diplomats to apologise for the sexual enslavement of up to 300,000 Korean women and girls, Russia sees an apology for the behaviour of soldiers 70 years ago as impossible as if its an attack on the military now.

So what about Trotskyist histories of World War Two?

Well sadly, there aren’t many. (Which I always found surprising given the number of political, economic and social struggles & change crammed into six years.) But those from the anti-Stalinist tradition who cover this period ought to feel able to talk about mass rape in wartime, ought to try to explain it within a Marxist understanding of imperialism and women’s oppression, and offer support to all those women seeking truth and justice.

Instead we get total silence, which in my book is little better than the denials and cover up spread by Stalinists, and the inability to take rape and war seriously demonstrated by most “Military Historians”.

Ernest Mandel crams a lot into just 175 pages in his analytical “The Meaning of the Second World War”. But he has nothing to say about the Red Army’s rape of two million German women.

Tony Cliff has nothing to say about it in his 1950 “Class Nature of the Peoples Democracies” Neither does Chris Harman in “Bureaucracy and Revolution”, though he has more than a page on how the Red Army let the nazi’s crush the Warsaw Uprising)

The articles by Chris Bambery , Michael Bradley in the ISJ have nothing to say. Nor does the ISJ debate around Donny Gluckstein‘s 2012 “A People’s History of the Second World War” (I haven’t got access to this book, so please prove me wrong). In fact five lines in Michael Bradley’s short review of Beevor’s “Berlin:Downfall” is the only mention of the Red Army rapes I could find in all the socialist histories I searched in.

Meanwhile, over at Counterfire, John Rees has produced a good TV documentary on “history of the second world war told from the perspective of ordinary people”. But these “ordinary people” seem not to include two million rape victims. I’m not able to say if Chris Bambery‘s latest book covers the subject, though Lyndsey German does at least discuss war and rape in her new “How a Century of War Changed the Lives of Women”

Ted Grant, who like Tony Cliff was a observer from afar at the time, did write about “the domination, plunder and enslavement of the Balkan and Central European peoples”. While he may be partially correct to write about “the admiration and support for the Red Army” and how “the entrance of the Red Army into Eastern Europe provoked a movement among wide strata of the oppressed workers and peasants”, he says nothing about the mass rapes across Eastern Europe and the role that fear would have played in the psychology of those “liberated”.

The only anarchist account I have of the period is a reprint 1948 IWA pamphlet “Bulgaria: Another Spain”. This details the brutality of the Red Army and how it quashed genuine attempts at workers uprisings in 1945. But even though the Red Army raped 100,000s of women across Eastern Europe (though Bulgaria less than others, perhaps because of similar linguistic and ethnic identities), there is not a single mention of rape in this otherwise excellent account.

Finally, if the men writing about the war cannot bring themselves to mention the rapes, can the writers about rape mention the mass rapes of the war? Sadly, no.

Sheila McGregor writing about rape and sexual violence in the ISJ in 1989 and 2013. She has nothing to say about mass rape in war time. Sandra Bloodworth says nothing in her otherwise excellent 1992 article “Rape, Sexual Violence and Capitalism”. While I understand that one of the main points these articles make is that rape happens within relationships and needs to be seen in the context of family structures in class society, I find it staggering that they say nothing about the use of mass rape and sexual abuse by soldiers during wars.

If there are any socialist, anarchist or left historians who deal with the mass rapes by the Soviet Army, I apologise. I could find nothing. If somebody can prove me wrong I would be overjoyed. Feeling ashamed of the socialist tradition is not easy. Years of denying that Marxism is “blind” to “women’s issues” and rape in particular are more questionable than ever in the light of the SWP’s rape cover up. But joining in the bourgeois and Stalinist historians in the cover up of millions of rapes is disgraceful. I can’t help thinking that perhaps the inability to deal with the the politics of rape was a factor in some of the appalling attitudes shown by some SWP members recently.

The Red Army, The Left and Rape Myths

“Bolshie Elaine” did a good job at demolishing some of the rape myths currently circulating around the SWP. Many of these simply perpetuate myths propagated by the dominant ideas of class societies going back thousands of years. Understanding these same myths are useful if we want to explain why the anti-Stalinist left ignored rape and how those on the left with admiration for the Red Army worked hard to ensure that the women’s stories would never be told, that this war crime would be hidden from history, that it would be impossible for “anyone to drag the reputation of the Red Army in the mud.”

MYTH ONE: Sexual history with the accused or others is in some way relevant

Many women across Eastern Europe, including the author of “A Woman In Berlin” found themselves seeking “protection” from more powerful officers in the Red Army. “No question about it: I have to find a single wolf to keep away the pack” she writes. “An officer, as high-ranking as possible, a commandant, a general, whatever I can manage” Submitting to one man who could prevent gang-rape by others does not mean that the officer had a right to have sex with the woman. I don’t know if these desperate women’s experiences are even counted in the rape figures.

MYTH TWO: She didn’t complain at the time…

Part of the horror for women in Eastern Europe was the total fear they experienced knowing that their home city was swarming with armed gangs of men who could rape at will with no consequence. There was no one to complain to, though of course women talked to each other. Once “order” was restored, in the queues for ration books and jobs, the women talk about how many times they’ve been raped and how they will deal with their husbands about it. The fear created lasted long after authority was restored- The Woman In Berlin describes howgoing out in the evening, she never sees women. In fact the figures for rape come not from the non-existent police, but the abortion clinics and VD clinics, which were overwhelmed with 100,000s of women desperate for abortions. It is also estimated that over 240,000 women died following their ordeal, either by suicide or as a result of the injuries sustained in the extreme violence of the attack. Some women did complain – Eva Shtul, a Soviet prisoner was raped by her countrymen liberating , and then beaten and raped by the officer she complained to.

MYTH THREE: The women were German/Nazi and were just making up anti-Soviet propaganda. It’s an attack on socialist politics.

No woman, whatever their political views, deserved to be raped. Furthermore, the Red Army raped Jews, Hungarians, Poles, Romanians, Austrians German communists, Russian prisoners and slave labourers, even those “liberated” from concentration camps.

As for the truth of these women’s stories, it is very well documented. Some of these unbearable testimonies are at the end of this piece.

MYTH FOUR: There are two sides to the story

This is where we are supposed to understand the terrible experiences of the average Russian solder at the hands of the Nazi occupation of the Western USSR. The mass rapes and forcing of women into army brothels, the devastation, the brutality of the war itself. These are often all the Left can say to explain why so many Red Army soldiers became rapists. While understanding the mentality of rapists may be an important part of stamping out all rape, this argument is often presented as some kind of excuse. More right wing commentators on the Red Army’s mass rapes focus on “backward”, “Asiatic” or peasant attitudes. Such racist views help nobody to understand or prevent rape.

MYTH FIVE: Drink was involved

Usually, the question of whether drink or drugs was involved is directed at the woman as part of a questioning of her ability to remember what happened or understand issues of consent. This time the myth is usd as an excuse for the rapists. That there was mass drunkenness amongst the occupiers of the Red Army is no secret. Any alcohol was looted and many soldiers died, poisoned by industrial alcohol. But since when did socialists justify behaviour by saying “the drink made them do it”?

MYTH SIX: I am not interested in this stuff, the key thing was stopping the Nazis and the Red Army beat Hitler

Regardless of this rape is rape, and a rapist is a rapist. The experiences of rape of millions of women is just as relevant as the experiences of civilian bombing, Dunkirk, RAF fighter pilots reaching for the sky etc. It is a war crime regardless of the failure of The Nuremberg trials not prosecuting anyone for rape or other sexual violence. Rape was defined as a crime against humanity, but prosecution was not included because such crimes had “no nexus to war.”

So Why did the “anti-Stalinist” Left ignore the mass rape by the Red Army?

Some will say that the best socialist historians of the war don’t accept any of the rape myths outlined above. They may claim that they had no knowledge of what happened precisely because so many have conspired to keep it hidden.

This is not good enough. Why?

Partly, because anybody who can research the details of the life of Soviet workers in the 1940s, or how production was organised, or how political leaders behaved is capable of researching the experience of women. They chose not to.

There has always been plenty of evidence about this hidden war crime. Susan Brownmiller details this at length in her classic feminist work on rape “Against Our Will”. This was written in 1975. Did our war writers not ever pick it up?? Before I conclude with some questions for the left, I feel I must repeat some of the evidence that has been around for a long time. This part in particular is disturbing to read.

Popular Memory

There is no way mass rape on the scale carried out by the Red Army cannot be known about by virtually everybody. These were not rapes behind closed doors. They were carried out in front of families, in the rubble, in the streets, and deliberately in front of men. A friend who lived in Berlin, Vienna and other parts of Germany in the 1980s confirmed that what the Red Army had done in 1945 was common knowledge. It was discussed. Memoirs published, films made, stories told and songs sung. When “Trümmerfrauen” , referring to the “Women of the rubble” who worked to clear the ruins of Berlin was painted on the Berlin Wall, everyone knew it was a reminder not just of the central role of women in rebuilding Germany after the war, but also the rapes and forced prostitution that so many of these women went through.

Soviet Accounts of Mass Rape

Like most armies, the Red Army was formally opposed to rape and soldiers could be punished for it. Undoubtedly some officers, especially the political officers, attempted to stop it. (Officers were permitted to keep a “campaign wife”, a PPZh, young women who worked at HQ as signallers, clerks , medics etc.) The political department of the 19th Army declared “When we breed a true feeling of hatred in a soldier, the soldier will not try to have sex with a German woman, because he will be repulsed”. But as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Red Army captain in East Prussia testified at the time, rape and general destruction of German civilians was the norm. he was arrested partly due to his critique of the treatment of civilians. His 1948 poem “Prussian Nights” gives a glimpse of the horror he witnessed.

The little daughter’s on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl’s been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse.
It’s all come down to simple phrases:
Do not forget! Do not forgive!
Blood for blood! A tooth for a tooth!

Svetlana Alexievich published a book, War’s Unwomanly Face (1985) that includes memories by Soviet veterans about their experience in Germany. According to a former army officer,

"

We were young, strong, and four years without women. So we tried to catch German women and … Ten men raped one girl. There were not enough women; the entire population run from the Soviet Army. So we had to take young, twelve or thirteen year-old. If she cried, we put something into her mouth. We thought it was fun. Now I can not understand how I did it. A boy from a good family… But that was me.”

A woman telephone operator from the Soviet Army recalled that

“When we occupied every town, we had first three days for looting and … [rapes]. That was unofficial of course. But after three days one could be court-martialed for doing this. … I remember one raped German woman laying naked, with hand grenade between her legs. Now I feel shame, but I did not feel shame back then… Do you think it was easy to forgive [the Germans]? We hated to see their clean undamaged white houses. With roses. I wanted them to suffer. I wanted to see their tears. … Decades had to pass until I started feeling pity for them”

Other accounts and interviews with former Red Army soldiers reveal the attitudes at the time.

More recently, Beevor’s “Berlin ;Downfall” notes that veterans today will “admit to hearing of a few excesses, and then dismiss the subject as an inevitable result of war.” Others are completely unrepentant. “Two million of our children were born [in Germany],” bragged one tank commander.

Beevor also cites the Soviet leader’s retort to a protest by Yugoslav Communist Milovan Dijilas about Soviet troops raping Romanian, Croatian and Hungarian women: “Can’t he understand it if a soldier has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?”

Vasily Grossman, later the well known writer of “Life and Fate” spent the war as a special correspondent for “Red Star”, the Red Army newspaper. After the war he admitted to his daughter that the Red Army “changed for the worse as soon as it crossed the Soviet border”. He describes

“Horror in the eyes of women and girls…..Horrifying things are happening to German women. An educated German whose wife has received ‘new visitors’ – Red Army soldiers – is explaining with expressive gestures and broken Russian words, that she has already been raped by ten men today…..women’s screams are heard from an open window……The women and girls[left behind] are safe while he [a Jewish officer] is there. When he leaves, they all cry and plead with him to stay. Soviet girls from the camps are suffering a lot now. Tonight, some of them are hiding in our correspondents room. During the night we are woken by screams : one of the correspondents couldn’t resist the temptation”

Later, once he reaches Berlin, he describes meeting a Frenchman who says to him “Monsieur. I love your army and that’s why it is painful for me to see its attitude to girls and women”

Beevor describes how Georgi Malenkov, one of Stalin’s top henchmen, reveals that Soviet troops arranging huge mass rapes of Russian girls. “I waited for the Red Army for days and nights,’ said one, ‘and now our soldiers treat us worse than the Germans did.”

Eyewitness from Germany

Paul Mattick who’d worked with the IWW (the Wobblies), and the Council Communists (what Lenin called the Left Communists) wrote an account in 1948 which describes how:

“Children would follow their mothers and sisters, only to see them ordered to bend over and lift their skirts to make ready for love in daylight and collectivity, to be loved by drunken soldiers still able, however, to keep an eye on the rooftops so as not to be killed in the act of copulation. Long afterwards, the smaller of the children would play the newly-learned “game of raping.”

Witnesses from the German Communist Party

Atina Grossmann records the views of many, including the KPD. As a party,they argued that given the drastic circumstances, women were “owed the right to an abortion”. But their leader Walter Ulbricht was unmoved by pleas for a crackdown on Red Army behaviour and refused to even consider allowing termination of the resulting “The gentlemen doctors should be reminded to exercise a bit of restraint on this matter” he wrote a tens of thousands of women filled the clinics for abortions and STD treatment.

Ordinary Communists pleaded with their leaders that “even the Red Army soldiers, now that the war is already over for eight weeks, absolutely must discipline themselves” Another communist wrote

“Men and women from the working population say to us over and over again : We had so hoped that it would become better, we were so happy the Red Army was coming, and now they are behaving just like the SS and NSAPD always told us they would. We cannot understand this.

Others at the time wrote about what was happening, including Eva Von Sacher-Masoch. Marianne Faithfull’s mother. The long term impact on her family was recently told by Marianne on BBc TV‘s “Who do you think you are?” recently. But her mother was also a feminist writer, and ensured the story of the rape of 100,000 Viennese women at the hands of the Red Army made the front page of her magazine in 1945.

Much of the recordings of the memories of the women was done at a much later date. In fact for some, it was the stories of mass rapes by Serbian ethnic cleansers that encouraged German women to tell their story.

In 1995 Helke Sander,published her book “liberators and liberated” in which she interviewed victims and researched archive documents.

“There were a lot of young girls raped. I talked to very many who were then 13, 14 years old and had no idea what happened to them. For many this meant that they later could never sleep with a man and , abhorrence of the sexual act “developed.” The rapes took place on the streets, in cellars, in homes, where children and other people watched. One of them was raped repeatedly by ten Russians in a row said “It has shaped my life as a woman. I have promised myself to stay alone.”

She later turned this account into a film. She documents the pregnancies, abortions, illegitimate children that resulted, as well as the break down in family relationships, the stigmatization these women experienced, and mental and physical duress these women underwent at the time of the rapes and as treaties were passed between the German and Soviets that never mentioned reparations for the rapes. She also interviews Soviet and German soldiers who admitted to raping women during the war.”

Margot Serowy shows the rape of German women by Russian soldiers in this painting. Serowy was born in East Prussia in 1937 and witnessed the apocalypse that Germany underwent at the end of WW2. She describes the painting thus, “Please take me. A mother’s plea to save her young daughter. Rape was a fact of life among the Russian soldiers. My mother was raped by seven of them right beside me. Children played at rape.”

There are so many accounts from survivors that surely the mass rapes a now undeniable. What we need to do now is explain why it happened.“Having always in the past slightly pooh-poohed the idea that most men are potential rapists, I had to come to the conclusion that if there is a lack of army discipline, most men with a weapon, dehumanised by living through two or three years of war, do become potential rapists,” Antony Beevor told The Bookseller.

Rape and War : What the Left needs to explain

Rape has been used as a weapon of dominance for centuries. In Bosnia and Sierra Leone recently. By the European and American slave owners who saw black women as animals, yet saw themselves as having the “droit de seigneur”. In some tribal wars that saw women captured and taken to the victors territory, and a host of wars and battles for thousands of years. Socialists must to be able to explain this. Otherwise we leave the debate to Susan Brownmiller and that strand of feminism that has at least been raising the issue for decades but despairs of changing men or the whole of society.

The left, if its claim to be the “Tribune of the Oppressed” is to be taken seriously also needs to expose this hidden history. In fact the mass rape of women by the Red Army is just one of the unmentioned war crimes from World War Two. It is estimated that up to ten million women were raped in the Soviet Union occupied by Hitler’s war machine, with between 750,000 and 1,000,000 children born to live with the hidden shame of their “fathers”. American soldiers too raped – over 11,000 in WW2, but also in Vietnam. The sexual abuse and rape of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib by the US military, including by female officers, is one of the few well known and discussed cases, and even here, the rapes were barely discussed.

To sum up, those on the left who are serious about looking at ourselves and working out how to rebuild an inclusive left movement, two questions must be answered.

Firstly, we ignored/trivialised/covered up mass rape. Why did we get it so wrong?

Secondly, in war, many many men, perhaps a majority, can become rapists, or at least pretend to look the other way and say nothing. What is our explanation for this and how does it affect our political practice?

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Tyrion

Nov 30 2013 04:58

Good piece, there've been lots of times when I've heard the Soviet war effort heroized by supposed socialists. I think the worst was when this Leninist that I know showed up at at a counter-demonstration against some neo-Nazi types wearing a giant Soviet pin and excitedly declaring that "the last time fascists attacked communists, we pushed them to the gates of Berlin!" Sincere guy, but absolute shit politics--I once got into an argument with him in which he very seriously claimed that the historical facts showed the Kronstadt uprising to be a White plot.

An excellent though harrowing post!
I recently came across one of the referenced books on a nazi website which emphasises the political capital they exploit via the actions of their co-nationalists in the shape of State "Communism"
This is a microcosm of the Lefts political atrophy and reactionary decline into the most extreme oppression!Its refusal to confront its degeneracy from the betrayal of its initial foundations and its craving for state power in the disguise of revolution and liberation opens an array of appalling vistas that culminate in the worst abuses and oppressions.
The bloody minded and obstinate refusal of the Left to condemn and confront the dystopia and monstrosity of State "communism"/Stalinism exemplifies its redundancy and the need to put forward a Libertarian alternative that is true to the origins of Communism and the aims of the International and the desires of St Imier in 1872.

there were exceptions, even among higher-ranking members of the stalinist KPD in May 1945 in Berlin according to Wolfgang Leonhard's account in Child of the revolution tried to raise the issue but were not successful ... another Soviet officer who got persecuted for protesting against rapes was Lev Kopelev (who had been in the late 1920ies a sympathizer of the Left Opposition and who became later an important figure in the dissident movement

The Stalinist concrete monstrosity built around the 'tomb of the unknown soldier' in Berlin, memorialising the dead of the Red Army, is sometimes known by those unsympathetic to Stalinism as the 'tomb of the unknown rapist'.

Good article, but as should be pointed out, we shouldn't be ashamed as we are not part of "The Left"

Part of the left or not, we're just as guilty of failing to talk about this stuff properly. Don't think the AF has anything on rape as a weapon of war for instance, despite talking pretty extensively about patriarchy in our Intro to Anarchist Communism.

In Russia it is clear that people were repressed for speaking about this. I don't know why historians in the West have ignored the topic though. Maybe just assholes consider it "war as usual".

I would assume it's part of the general tendency of presenting the Allied war effort as a heroic crusade against evildoers. Though Stalin is certainly treated as a brutal tyrant by mainstream American history (particularly during those times that he wasn't allied with the Western powers), I don't remember any mention of Soviet horrors during WWII being mentioned when I was in public school. University courses are presumably a bit better, but I didn't take any that touched on WWII in any detail. The invasion and occupation of Poland in cooperation with the Nazis is also something that I only learned about on my own.

James Heartfield in the comments for the original post points out that racializing by both the Nazis and West Germany can be a reason why someone left like the author might have ideas about "McCarthyism" plots. Susan Brownmiller, who the author mentions, points a similar anecdote about a movie where Moroccan troops rape Italian women:

Quote:

" As I recall, Lawson felt that this amounted to overt racism, and that by right the movie rapists should have been Germans, since everybody knows that the Germans were the villains of the war. Lawson's commentary is a pristine example of the old left mentality as regards rape; when their side does it, it's exquisite proof of the bestiality of the enemy; when our side does it, it's bad politics to bring it up."

I don't see any "covering up" of mass rape though. It sounds to me the author relied too much on Beevors book, which the latter heavily marketed as revealing some hidden truths. There's been plenty written about the subject over the years and West Germany, in particular, used the subject for Cold War politics. Sure there's been more written on the subject since the 90's but that's like saying people ignored the Holocaust until the 80's (if not the 60's) because there wasn't a lot of popular media on it (and even afterwards Jews were depicted as middle class and secular Christian-like instead of the majority who were illiterate religious peasants). The author writes

Quote:

When French wannabe-Fuhrer Jean Marie Le Pen called the murder of 6 million Jewish people a “detail in the history of World War Two”, he was quite rightly condemned, and had to pay a 1.2million franc fine. Yet the attitude to nearly all historians of world war two towards the mass rapes of up to twelve million women is that it either just a detail, a footnote, or not even worthy of mention. Obviously it’s not just The Left that have a problem with recognising the reality of rape as part of war. Practically none of the many volumes of military history give it as much as a mention.

Yet it was 12 million who were killed in the concentration camps. Does this reveal some left attitude about Roma? In of itself I don't think so. Both popular historians and leftists conform to what the current trends in the dominant culture are, which is very opportunistic.

As far as the Russian ambassador goes I think his remarks were based on Beevor being British and the growing imperialist tensions between the two countries, nothing more. Historians like Beevor depict the Soviets as not one of the three "Allies" but as a separate totalitarian body the white democracies just happened to ally with. This is considered dangerous to the nationalism of the Russian elite. I'm not aware that Svetlana Alexievich (also mentioned above) when she release her book was condemned in such a forceful manner, certainly not in such a uniform manner but maybe I'm wrong.

Finnaly if the author looked more into Susan Brownmiller's book instead dismissing her they could have discovered some errors in Brevors book. For instance she dismisses anti-communist Dijlas account of meeting with Stalin as "not altogether trustworthy." And in the case of Solzhenitsyn, far from being "arrested partly due to his critique of the treatment of civilians" when he landed in jail for criticizing Stalin in his mail he was outraged (!) to find three officers in jail with him for attempted rape, something he characterized "almost a combat distinction" And even Beevor himself in an interview with a Polish newspaper said German women were part of a "society" that "supported Hitler" so they are not on the "same level the same victims of the war as Jews, Poles or Russians."

btw.: the mass rapes and gang rapes committed by French and to a lesser extant by American (don't know about UK/Commonwealth soldiers) soldiers in Germany 1945 are an even less researched and discussed topics, there are very few scholarly publications and I can't remember any left-wing publication in German language dealing explicitly with the topic, especially the conduct of French soldiers in some German towns like Konstanz or Bruchsal was on the same scale than the conduct of Soviet soldiers in Berlin, cases of gang rapes by American soldiers led to a number of court martial trials but generally only when Black soldiers were involved ... but I think, that rape generally was a non-topic on the left (reflecting the attitudes of wider society) up to the late 1970ies

somewhere related is the topic of female members of the French resistance (among them a number of German and Austrian communist refugees) who worked as prostitutes targeting German soldiers to do defaitist propaganda, to steal weapons or to carry out attacks, many of them were after 1944/45 treated as collaborators, humiliated and persecuted, most of their comrades remained silent about it

The treatment of all Germans at the end of the war and during the occupation has always been a very secretive and sensitive issue. Research into the subject could easily get one branded as a NAZI-apologist, esp on the left. As an unfortunate result, it has often been an area of study left only to conservatives and neo-fascists.

My own family came out of occupation Germany, but primarily from the western zones. Rape, murder and assault was not uncommon there either (altho perhaps not on the scale of Berlin 45). Growing up I was bombarded with horror stories from my grandparents about this period, but the issue is still almost unspeakable in North America

it very much comes down to the concrete situation, I've heard many cases from people I know, even from the East where people have good recollections from the allied soldiers (not only because GIs handed out chocolate bars to children), e.g. my parents who were nine respectively five have no negative memories from that period, probably due to the fact that they were in rural/small town areas with few fighting ... a footnote on the rapes by Soviet soldiers is, that the Nazi propaganda often spoke of Asiatic, Tatar or Mongolian savages but according to an oral history studies (have to look if I can find the reference), the Soviet soldiers from Central Asia and the few hundreds of Mongolian volunteers were mostly perceived by the Germans who had contact with them as well-behaved and gentle people

Its not about guilt, its picking up on the tendency to take a view of the past whereby informal myth manufacturing takes place in order to shore up a certain view of history, and the implicit fear that people aren't able to separate out the bad from the good in history.

ie. trotskyists performing somersaults with regard to Trotsky's role in the suppression of the Kronstadt soviet and the bolshevik's suppression of the factory committees, not all CNT collectivised workplaces in the Spanish rev being horizontal and sometimes retaining a capitalist management structure, the IWW being more limited in its role in organising across racial boundaries than claimed, rather embarrassing anti-feminist tendency in Lotta Continua in Italy 1960s/70s, the KAPD operating an entryist strategy at one point, the history of the secret leadership group in the french anarchist federation in the 1950s/60s etc.

Now personally, with the exception of the bolsheviks, I like all of those organisations. The problem is that the desire to manufacture a perfect moral history of them is wrong.

Not only is it a sly approach, but it is ultimately more damaging in the long run through encouraging the wrong approach to politics. It was something Orwell was trying to point to, and as much as I dislike his more liberal advocates due to how they use him to bash revolutionary politics, it is often only they that recognise this, while trotskyists read animal farm, 1984 etc. only as a critique of stalinism, and anarchists read it as solely a critique of hierarchy/bolshevism.

Its good to be righteous about revolutionary politics, but if you are going to take responsibility for disseminating its ideas, you have to take responsibility for the acknowledging the gray areas of its history. Anyone unaligned to the politic will be able to see through you otherwise as blinkered.

Obviously, no one worth speaking to intentionally defends Stalinism, but the point I took from the article is that people sick of the constant barrage of reactionary propaganda still let their ideology informally cover for things they shouldn't.

Leomarinus gets my point. Thank you.
And thanks Juan for linking the piece to my blog- at first I thought it'd been cut & pasted without a link.
What I'm trying to do here is break some myths & point out a blindspot on the left - and by left I include all shades of anarchism as well as syndicalists and libertarian & Left/council Communists.
One myth is that rape was a relatively small feature of the Eastern Front, a detail of history. Or that it "just happens" in wars. In fact there are some wars & armies that have seen mass rape on a huge scale - see links in my second follow up piece.The Jonathan Neale article linked tries to grapple with this question.
The blindspot is the fact that "the left" has ignored or rarely discussed mass rape. This may well be because the focus for any discussion about rape has been on how most rapes are committed by men that the woman knows, and getting that accepted can be hard enough. But anyone who beiieves it is possible to create a world in which we can be free from an elite dominating us and using power needs to be able to explain why in some situations a huge percentage of men will either rape or standy and do nothing. I don't see any explanation of this on the left except for feminists like Brownmiller. They did much to uncover this decades ago, but I'm trying to get us all to debate how our various theories either can explain mass rape or need to be changed because of it.

I agree with your post about separating the historical good from the bad, leomarinus, but the title of this article nevertheless says:

Quote:

why we should all be ashamed of the left’s role in covering up the rape of 2 million women

Yes, this is shameful mass crime, as are any attempts to cover it up, but I am still unsure why (according to the title) we should all be ashamed for the actions of stalinists, apologists for stalinism and the assorted leftists attempts to cover up this atrocity.

Good article, but as should be pointed out, we shouldn't be ashamed as we are not part of "The Left"

Part of the left or not, we're just as guilty of failing to talk about this stuff properly. Don't think the AF has anything on rape as a weapon of war for instance, despite talking pretty extensively about patriarchy in our Intro to Anarchist Communism.

Point taken, and we should. I seem to remember we raised the subject of mass rape in an article of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War Two, though I don't have the copy of Organise! to hand

Think people are perhaps interpreting the title of the piece a touch literally. If there's a blindspot in our analysis then the important thing is to acknowledge it and try to rectify it, being defensive is no more useful than shame.

Battlescarred wrote:

Point taken, and we should. I seem to remember we raised the subject of mass rape in an article of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War Two, though I don't have the copy of Organise! to hand

Good article, and a subject deserving attention. Poor choice of title. It ties the left to rape, it has a polemical sting. Is mass rape isolated to leftist states? No. Does it have anything to do with the philosophy? No. It is like the rain; indifferent to borders. A lack of policy. It's not left or right, it's the female-male dichotomy. Given the opportunity, some men (and women) will use whatever advantage to gain from others. The title would be better if it were specific to place and goverent and didn't indict the left as a whole.

some East German authors like Christa Wolf (who can be described as a feminist socialist with strong dissident leanings), Erwin Strittmatter (who had a "complicated relationship" with the state) and Werner Heiduczek (don't know about his particular position) mentioned the rapes in novels during the 1970ies, a second edition of Heiduczek's Tod am Meer was banned in 1978 after an intervention by the Soviet embassy ... rape by victorious soldiers is an important topic in Christa Wolf's novel Kassandra (1983) which is set in the Trojan War portraying e.g. Achill as a rapist (but may also deal with the massacre and mass rapes at El Mozote in El Salvador in 1981) ... according to the German Wikipedia article on rapes during/after the 2nd WW, there was an editorial in the East German party daily Neues Deutschland on the rapes in 1948, will try to find it

Stalin himself is reported (by Djilas) to have said: "People should understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle."

Quote:

Part of the left or not, we're just as guilty of failing to talk about this stuff properly.

As a left communist, there is nothing I'm ashamed or guilty of here. Obviously not seeing myself as a part of the left, and regarding the Stalinsts as well as the Trotskyists who covered this up as people with bourgeois politics makes things easier. The communist left didn't support World War 2, and Paul Mattick himself, quoted in this very article clearly exposing the crimes of the Red Army in 1948, is one of the most important militants and theoreticians of the left communist tradition.

Personally this is the sort of thing I've argued repeatedly with Stalinists of various shades throughout my political life, online as well as offline. The behavior of the Red Army never surprised me as either, seeing WW2 not as a heroic war against fascism but an imperialist war.

Of course, this is not to say that there is nothing to criticize about the left communist tradition in regards to the question of patriarchy and its theoretical study.

Stalin himself is reported (by Djilas) to have said: "People should understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle."

Quote:

Part of the left or not, we're just as guilty of failing to talk about this stuff properly.

As a left communist, there is nothing I'm ashamed or guilty of here. Obviously not seeing myself as a part of the left, and regarding the Stalinsts as well as the Trotskyists who covered this up as people with bourgeois politics makes things easier. The communist left didn't support World War 2, and Paul Mattick himself, quoted in this very article clearly exposing the crimes of the Red Army in 1948, is one of the most important militants and theoreticians of the left communist tradition.

Personally this is the sort of thing I've argued repeatedly with Stalinists of various shades throughout my political life, online as well as offline. The behavior of the Red Army never surprised me as either, seeing WW2 not as a heroic war against fascism but an imperialist war.

Of course, this is not to say that there is nothing to criticize about the left communist tradition in regards to the question of patriarchy and its theoretical study.

yeah, I feel the same way.

And when it comes to Russia and the Red Army: up until recently they had made a pact with Hitler! They only got upset with him when he got round to invading Russia!

Stalin himself is reported (by Djilas) to have said: "People should understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle."

Quote:

Part of the left or not, we're just as guilty of failing to talk about this stuff properly.

As a left communist, there is nothing I'm ashamed or guilty of here. Obviously not seeing myself as a part of the left, and regarding the Stalinsts as well as the Trotskyists who covered this up as people with bourgeois politics makes things easier. The communist left didn't support World War 2, and Paul Mattick himself, quoted in this very article clearly exposing the crimes of the Red Army in 1948, is one of the most important militants and theoreticians of the left communist tradition.

Personally this is the sort of thing I've argued repeatedly with Stalinists of various shades throughout my political life, online as well as offline. The behavior of the Red Army never surprised me as either, seeing WW2 not as a heroic war against fascism but an imperialist war.

Of course, this is not to say that there is nothing to criticize about the left communist tradition in regards to the question of patriarchy and its theoretical study.

The Trotskyists did not officially cover this up, ignore it, or defend it until their 1950 world congress when they decided that the Eastern European regimes were "degenerated workers states" and that therefore the Soviet army had brought socialism.

Prior to that, the Trotskyist press did report on the crimes of the "red" army.

recently read that according to some accounts, leading KPD militant Rudolf Lentzsch, (who lead the KPD's red metal workers union EVMB during the first period of illegality after the Nazis came to power in 1933) was murdered by Soviet soldiers in late April 1945 when he tried to defend women against being raped, other accounts say that he was murdered while being robbed

recently read that according to some accounts, leading KPD militant Rudolf Lentzsch, (who lead the KPD's red metal workers union EVMB during the first period of illegality after the Nazis came to power in 1933) was murdered by Soviet soldiers in late April 1945 when he tried to defend women against being raped, other accounts say that he was murdered while being robbed

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